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Discovering Red Molly

Posted in Abbie Gardner, Bruce Byfield, Carolann Solebello, dobro, Laurie McAllister, Mollie Venter, Personal, Red Molly, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I have been listening to Richard Thompson for decades, so I am probably pre-disposed to like a group called Red Molly – it’s the name of the woman in “Vincent Black Lightning, 1952,” the song that Thompson describes as “a love story complicated by a motorcycle.” However, although the name was what first drew my attention, I quickly learned to appreciate the group for its harmonies and musicianship, as well as its versatile selection of materials.

Red Molly consists of three women: Abbie Gardner, Laurie McAllister, and, more recently Mollie Venter, who joined the group in 2010 when Carolann Solebello moved on. In both incarnations, the group characterizes itself as playing Americana – meaning everything from traditional folk songs to blues and country, along with its members’ own compositions. The band takes full advantage of its versatility, its members harmonizing on everything from poignant ballads to rock, and alternating on vocals and guitar. Gardner often adds a unique sound by playing the dobro, often in genres other than the bluegrass with which most people associate it, and the other members have also been known to pick up other instruments such as the bass and banjo.

Perhaps half the band’s material is covers, many of which rival the original, including a version of “Vincent Black Lightning 1952.” Their other covers include an arrangement of “Homeward Bound” that captures the yearning homesickness of the original, and a rocking version of Lucinda William’s “Can’t Let Go.” Their version of Darrell Scott’s “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” is especially chilling, more than enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

However, I am equally fond of their original songs. Venter’s “I am Listening” is a sweet, understated description of the early stages of love,” while in her “Willow Tree,” the tree becomes the symbol of a long-term relationship’s joys and sorrows. McAllister’s original songs, such as “This Farm Needs a Man” are equally memorable, although to my taste she does not write nearly enough of them. However, the most prolific in the current lineup is Abbie Gardner, whose solo albums not only show a fondness for old reinterpreting blues standards like “Ain’t Misbehaving” and “Comes Love,” but also the ability to write songs like “Break It Slow” and “Bang Bang” that mix so indistinguishably with such standards that they might have been written in the same era. Gardner also writes in a more introspective style in “The Mind of a Soldier” and the wistful “Copper Ponies.”

I didn’t plan for Red Molly to become one of current listening favorites, but the more I heard, the more I liked, until I now own eleven of their group and solo albums, and am intending to buy more. In particular, I still have more of Venter’s solo albums to enjoy. No doubt the fact that many of their songs are available in .flac format helps, because I can hear them to best advantage. Yet even without that audio advantage, the way their voices blend and the variety in their songs would easily keep me listening.


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The keys to quality music

Posted in Bruce Byfield, cables, DAC, ear buds, headphones, music, music players, Personal, speakers, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 19, 2017| 1 Comment »

Ask most people what makes quality music, and inevitably they reply that it’s the speakers. I’m not sure whether that was ever true, or if the speakers were simply one of the few pieces of hardware that users could choose, but it’s definitely not the case in this age of digital music.

Speakers do matter, of course. However, thanks to printed circuits, selecting them is no longer a matter of the larger the better. Today, you can get the same sound from a eight centimeter high wireless speaker that you once needed a seventy-five centimeter wired speaker for. And, although you still can’t go astray with traditional quality brands such as Bose, other brands like Logitech’s UE (Ultimate Ears) are also worth considering.

If you use headphones or ear buds, the headphone amplifier on your music player takes the place of speakers. For example, Fiio, an up and coming Chinese maker of audio equipment makes several different amplifiers for different listening preferences to accompany its top of the line music player. The cables used to connect headphones or ear buds can also make a difference, with those made from metals like titanium being at the high end.

Then there is the digital file. A 32 bit file is going to capture more nuances than an 8 bit one, and a 192K sample rate more than a 42K one, regardless of what hardware you play them back on. Format also matters, with FLAC being preferred by many audiophiles because of its advanced capabilities.

Still another consideration is the DAC (Digital to Analog Converter), which turns the digital file into sound. Unlike with speakers, with DACs, size still matters – a music player the length of your thumb does not have room for a first-rate DAC, which currently requires a device about the size of a cell phone. Even so, modern DACs deliver quality that was once only available with several bulky boxes many times their weight.

All these considerations are often bundled for you. Download sites, for example, often offer low quality files in MP3 formats, with occasional special offers of files with a higher sampling format. Similarly, headphone amplifiers and DACs are usually not compatible with other brands, or even other formats, although headphones, ear buds, and cables generally are.

If you are ripping your own digital music or selecting a music player and its accessories, take into account where you will play music. An apartment dweller will have little use for Fiio’s A5 headphone amplifier, because they are unlikely to be playing music loud enough to appreciate its ability to keep the bass from distorting at high volumes. Instead, the less specialized A3 headphone amplifier is probably a more reasonable choice. Similarly, if you want music for riding the bus, even with noise-canceling headphone, you will probably have enough external noise that you can’t appreciate a 32bit FLAC file, and it will simply take up extra storage space.

Sorting through all these considerations can be complex. All the same, don’t just stop with the speakers or headphones when you are considering how to play your music. Today,  focusing on the speakers is only part of what you need to consider.

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Electrifying the past

Posted in cultural continuity, folk rock, Loreena McKennitt, music, oysterband, Personal, Pete Morton, Steeleye Span, Tom Lewis, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »

One night when I was 14, I was doing my homework at the desk in the downstairs basement of my parents’ house. My transistor radio was playing, but I wasn’t paying close attention. The radio station was playing far too much Chicago and Elton John, for my liking, and not nearly enough Eric Clapton or Bob Dylan.

Suddenly, guitars kicked in, and a woman started singing, her voice mildly eerie and like no vocal performance I had ever heard, “True Thomas sat on Huntleigh bank / When he espied a lady may.” I strained for the words for a few stanzas, and then a rock beat struck up in utter contrast, “Harp and carp, come along with me, Thomas the Rhymer…”

At the time, I had never heard of Thomas of Ercildoune, aka Thomas the Rhymer, the Scottish prophet who met the Queen of Elfland and was carried off to her realm for seven years. I hadn’t even heard of Steeleye Span. But the arrangement and the words haunted me, and eventually – this being pre-Internet – I realized what I was hearing was a modern version of a seven hundred year old song.

This continuity of culture fascinated me. Folk purists claimed to be outraged by Steeleye Span’s efforts in this direction, but as am adolescent raised on stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood who was trying to reconcile these interests with modern politics, I was entranced. I became a lifelong fan of Steeleye Span, and to this day, songs that modernize old songs are among my favorites.

I remember, for example, just before twilight at the Vancouver Folk Festival hearing Oysterband doing a rocked up version of “Hal-an-tow,” the centuries old Morris dance. I played it for Paul Zimmer, one of the SCA founders, a few weeks later, and I remember him doubling over, his laughter ringing out like a cannon shot when he heard the refrain, “Summer is a-coming in / And winter’s gone away.” A harpist from Denver condemned it as sacrilege and an affront to her ears, which only made Paul and I laugh harder.

Years later, Oysterband, in its “Ragged Kingdom” collaboration with June Tabor, would do much the same with “The Bonny Bunch of Roses,” converting the conversation between Napoleon’s son and widow about the dangers of England from a slow harp arrangementd into a magic altogether quicker and more electrified. Again it was condemned by the purists, and overwhelmed the open-minded.

Over the years, there have been other updated songs that have enticed me, among them: Pete Morton’s acapella, punk-tinged version of “Tam Lin,” Tom Lewis’s setting of Rudyard Kipling poems to music, and Loreena McKennitt’s similar treatments of “The Lady of Shallot,” “The Stolen Child” and “The Highwayman.” There was even the Corries’ tongue-in-cheek explanation of how they were restoring “Ghost Riders in the Sky” to its original Scottish form – which was really the story of a modern bar fight described as a Western brawl.

What all these songs have in common is the idea that the past is still alive, and still worth knowing. I am very far from a conservative, but in our era of throwaway culture, something pleases me about this assumption.

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Reaching my goals for a music system

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Fiio, micro SD cards, music, music players, music system, Personal, Uncategorized, X1, x7, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 31, 2016| Leave a Comment »

The last few years of Trish’s life, she was on disability, and increasingly bedridden. Although I work from home, her situation caused few problems, except for one thing – she wanted to play music, and music — at least with words — distracts me when I write. As a compromise, I bought her a music player, and soon bought one for myself to use when I was on the bus or Skytrain. The only problem was, no player of the time could hold more than about one-fifth of nine hundred albums. So an ambition was born: to have all our music digitized and accessible from a single, portable source.

For the first decade of the millennium, the goal was barely possible. For a while, I thought of using a dedicated netbook, but that was not as convenient as a music player.

More importantly, the goal faced several problems. I had not thrown out any music I had bought since high school, and I am one of those who still buys music as a way of supporting artists I admire. For years, concerts and the Vancouver Folk Festival had been a major form of socialization for us, and over the years we had accumulated an unlikely collection of vinyl records, cassettes, and CDs. Our stereo needed four components just so we play it all. In order to access them from one device, I would need to digitize all my albums. In addition, I would need to divide the albums into tracks to take full advantage of them.

However, digitizing is easier to talk about than to do. A CD can be ripped in about five minutes, but records and cassettes have to be recorded while playing, and divided into tracks manually. The process is tedious, so after quickly digitizing the CDs, I tackled the records and cassettes in starts and stops. In fact, I don’t expect to finish it until near the end of 2017, partly because I changed my mind partway through and decided that, for many artists, I wanted high quality sound, not the standard MP3 file size – even though, because I was using the Ogg Vorbis format, my files were higher quality than most of the ones I could find online.

The second obstacle is that the memory for music players – that is, the size of micro SD cards – increased slowly. Trish had been two years dead before about two-thirds of our music could fit on a micro SD card, and that meant swapping music out several times a week since I wanted variety.

The problem was finally solved when micro SD cards with 128 megabytes were released a couple of years ago, but most music players were not equipped to handle the files that cards of this size could hold. Many had a limit to their list of tracks that was far below the size of the cards. The only way to view all my files was to use the view of the memory, and that meant there was no way to play them in the order they appeared on the album. Most of the time, I listen to music by album, on the grounds that how musicians arrange albums is part of the experience they want their audience to have, so this was a problem.

This last barrier fell when I needed to replace my music player, and accidentally discovered the Fiio line of music players – or, more accurately, of portable stereos. When I bought the entry level X1 in October 2016, it had solved this final problem while producing sound that was far superior to that of other music players. The X1 gave me a music player to use outside the townhouse, but I soon decided that I wanted the top of the line X7 for use around the home. The X7 had even better sound than the X1, solved all my problems, and was even set up to stream music from the Internet when WiFi was turned on.

Accordingly, after several weeks of resisting the temptation, I bought an X7 as a Christmas present for myself. My biggest problem now is to decide whether to stay with a single Bluetooth speaker, or to buy at least one more. I may just carry the speaker with me into the kitchen or living room so that I can position it to give me the best sound.

I only wish Trish could have heard this solution. Being of the same generation as I am, she would be amazed at a music system that weighed about 1200 grams and could be held in one hand. Better still, she would have loved having all our music in one source as much as I do.

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My rediscovery of music

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Fiio, music, music-education, Personal, portable stereo, rediscovery of music, Uncategorized, X1, x7, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 28, 2016| Leave a Comment »

I have spent the last few months in the grip of an enthusiasm. At my age, I am proud I can still have an enthusiasm, because it proves that I have kept a youthful engagement with the world well into middle-age, but it is one I would have thought unlikely when I was a boy. It is, of all things, an enthusiasm for the Fiio line of music players – or, as I prefer to think of them, portable stereos.

I learned about music the hard way, by myself, with lots of false leads and blind alleys. My family is not musical, and my elementary school music teacher, who wanted to be a professional musician, was only interested in encouraging students who had already taken music lessons. When the transfer to high school allowed me drop music, I did so without hesitation. The only reason I was even attempting to play the trombone was that it could be rented to own cheaply.

I started high school so profoundly ignorant that I might have grown up to be a life-long hater of music. I definitely took years to develop any knowledge; I was in my twenties, for example, before I could tell the difference between a sharp and a flat, and when I learned, I was profoundly excited.

Yet free from the humiliation of the band, I started discovering music first. As a would-be writer, I gravitated naturally to songwriters: first Simon and Garfunkel, and later Bob Dylan. Other explorations, such as the work of all the Beatles after the band broke up, including Yoko Ono, did not last, being less fortunate.

Still, by the time I started university, I was a compulsive music listener. I developed a taste for folk rock, and I still remember being down in the basement bedroom in my parents’ house, listening to Steeleye Span singing “Thomas the Rhymer” on my cheap transistor, absolutely delighted that a song seven hundred years old had been transformed into a modern hit.

Throughout my marriage, the Vancouver Folk Festival and later the Rogue Folk Club were the main part of our socializing. I can still remember the first time I heard Stan Rogers, Loreena McKennitt and Oysterband, and over the years we bought hundreds of records, cassettes and CDs (people bought albums in my youth, and I still do, as a way of supporting artists I appreciate). Usually at the folk festival we bought cassettes, because they were less likely to warp in the summer sun.

Over the last seven years, I have been slowing digitalizing my music collection. Usually, I made files of medium quality, reasoning that, since I would often be listening to the digital files on public transit, high quality files would be largely wasted on me. I looked forward to the day when all my music would be available from the same source, envisioning first a dedicated laptop and later a music player with enough memory to hold 12,000 tracks or so.

As SD micro cards became larger, I was nearing that goal when my Sansa Fuze music player needed to be replaced. I bought a Sansa Clip, but the manufacturer had lapsed from their former standards. My new player especially seemed to dislike my Ogg Vorbis files, refusing to recognize some and only playing others at a whisper.

According to my research, the Fiio X1 should perform better. I had noticed it when searching for a new player, but it seemed unusually large and clunky. I especially disliked the arrangement of four buttons at the corners of the scroll wheel – an example of poor design if there ever was one. But if it could let me play my files in the way I wanted, I was prepared to put up with the appearance. I did wonder, though, if the X1 would burst the seams of my pocket.

My reluctance vanished the first time I tried the X1. Even my average quality files sounded better on it. As for the high quality ones – have you heard the expression “wall of sound”? It refers to arrangements full of orchestration, each instrument interacting with the others in complex and interesting ways. That was what I heard on the X1. I even heard subtleties I had never heard on music players from other manufacturers.

That was when I realized why Fiio products were so much larger than other music players. They weren’t just music players. They were portable stereos, and, as far as miniaturization has progressed, their DAC (Digital Analog Converters) and headphone amplifiers could still only be made so small. The Fiio product line did not consist of oversized music players, but stereo systems that were as small as our current technology allowed.

As a lover of both excellence and music, I bored everyone in hearing about this discovery. Before long, I began planning to re-record some of my digitized music with the highest quality possible. I also decided I wanted an X7, Fiio’s top of the line product, for use at home. Unfortunately, my editors were slow in paying at the time, and I knew I had to wait.

Finally, in the last week before Christmas, payments started rolling in. One morning, I was just debating whether I could afford an X7 when I received a cheque for almost exactly the amount I needed.

This, I told myself, was obviously kismet. Within moments, I had placed my order. Miraculously, in the middle of the holiday season, it arrived the next day.

I had read the universally enthusiastic reviews of the X7, so I knew what to expect. Still, having been impressed already by the X1, I doubted there was much room for any improvement.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. As superior as the X1 was to music players from other manufacturers, so the X7 was to the X1. The wall of sound had become a tsunami, and I have happily spent the last few days rediscovering my music. Once or twice, I have even mistaken a detail I could only detect on the X7 for a sound behind me or in the next room.

This was not just music; this was the kind of revelation that produces fanatics. The interface, the construction, the sound and everything else about the X7 has a quiet quality that I both respect and enjoy immensely.

I already listen regularly to music, but already I suspect I will be listening to a lot more. It sounds like advertising hype, but I really do feel like I have rediscovered music — including many old favorites — all over again because of my purchases.

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When June Tabor sang “White Rabbit” live

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Grace Slick, Jefferson Airplane, June Tabor, music, oysterband, Personal, Vancouver, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I remember several memorable musical moments in my life. There was the Vancouver Folk Festival where I first heard Stan Rogers singing “The Witch of the Westmoreland” against the reflection of the sunset on the eastern clouds, and the first time Spirit of the West played the Commodore, when our table on the sprung dance floor was bouncing up and down. I remember, too, hearing Loreena McKennitt at the Mythopoeic Conference I helped organized, her voice floating through the hall while the crowd was open-mouthed and silent. But so far the greatest was hearing June Tabor and OysterBand doing their sendup cover of The Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit.

The venue was the pub on the old Expo 86 grounds. I forget what it was being called at the time; several incarnations came and went before the fact that the space wasn’t commercially viable became obvious. It was a big space, and too far from the beaten path to attract many people.

The exception was the night that OysterBand and June Tabor performed, and you could see that the waiters were not happy with the crowd. It was a crowd that had come to listen, not to buy drinks, no matter how hard the waiters tried. I don’t know about anyone else, but after about the eighth invitation to buy another drink, Trish and I took to ignoring the waiters’ unsubtle persistence, except to turn away and face the stage more squarely.

If you have heard OysterBand live, it goes without saying that the set started fast and continued with almost perfect orchestration, the slow and softer numbers coming at exactly the right places to provide a change from the faster and harder ones. If you have heard June Tabor in any medium, it also goes without saying that her voice could make you world-weary or arouse tears just by the way she emphasized the right word. As usual, her voice with its faintly Northern accent sounded like that of a survivor, tough and proud and knowing everything there is to know about suffering.

We wished the set would never end, but eventually it did end. A long pause followed, and just as the last chances of an encore seemed to disappear, the lights turned psychedelic. Clouds of dry-ice started to obscure the stage, and June Tabor could be seen in a leather mini-skirt, striking a pose like the young Grace Slick, although she was forty-five at the time. She looked stunning – not just beautiful or sexy, although she had something of both, but someone both totally in command of the audience, yet simultaneously camping it up and not wanting anyone to take her completely seriously.

A few people in the audience took up her unspoken invitation and laughed. A few of us recognized the opening strains of “White Rabbit.” Like me, most of them probably expected a few notes, a reference like other bands at the time might make to “Stairway to Heaven” before segueing into another song altogether.

But after a few bars, the members of OysterBand appear to one side of Tabor, and the light show began to imitate that of the video in which The Airplane performed “White Rabbit” on The Smothers Brothers’ show. Slowly, Tabor began singing the first two lines of the song, “One pill makes you smaller / And one pill makes you small.” At the end of the lines, you could hear her accent.

By the third line, Tabor was no longer camping, but singing with exactly the suppressed passion of Grace Slick, almost sounding like Slick except for the burr in her voice.

The difference was that, while Slick sounds ambiguous on “White Rabbit,” Tabor sounded angry. Simply by emphasizing “ones,” she made the line, “And the ones that mother gives you” sound angry and contemptuous. In a single word, she seemed to dismiss convention

The contempt continued in the next line. Under Tabor’s phrasing, “go ask Alice” became bitterly sarcastic and so did the very idea that Alice could tell anyone anything “when she’s ten feet tall.” Just by emphasizing “chasing,” she conveyed the idea that “chasing rabbits” was a ludicrous pastime. Listening, I felt she was giving me personally an extensive tongue-lashing, listing my shortcomings one by one, but I was fascinated and could only lean forward to listen more closely.

The men on the chessboard and the white queen were sung about with a voice of someone who had seen them and knew they were inevitable and tiresome. In these verses, her phrasing sounded much like Slick’s. But when Tabor reached what for Slick was the end of the song – the repetition of the Dormouse’s advice to “Feed your head” – Tabor did not invite the listeners to turn on, as Slick did. Instead, she seemed to be advising us to get smart and learn from the experience.

This impression was reinforced by the fact that she didn’t end the song there. Rather, after an instrumental, she returned to the first verse, singing the words in a flat voice and letting the pause at the end of the last line trail off into silence.

I suppose you could interpret Tabor’s treatment of the song as anti-drug. However, it didn’t come across as so specific. Instead, she sounded like someone who had rushed into foolish things of all sorts warning others neither to imitate her nor expect anything help from the orthodox.

But however you interpret Tabor’s phrasing, it struck the audience like a fist to the solar plexus. When it ended, the audience was silence for a beat. Then everyone spontaneously leaped to their feet in one of the few non-calculated standing ovations I have seen, and you couldn’t talk for the applause.

Personally, I was glad to fall back into my seat. After listening to that one song, I felt as though I had run a marathon with a deflated lung. Like many other members of the audience, I lingered, playing with my drink until we felt strong enough to leave. Neither of us could express what we had seen with more than a half-articulate, “Wow!” express what we had seen, but we knew it had been something profound and memorable — something that we felt privileged to witness.

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21 of my favorite popular music albums

Posted in Bruce Byfield, favorite albums, folk music, folk rock, music, Personal, punk folk, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »

In these days of iTunes, albums are probably obsolete. However, I still prefer to listen by albums, knowing how much care many musicians take to arrange material.

I have some thousand albums, all of which I’m slowly digitalizing while hardware like USB cassette players still exist to make the task easy. Choosing one over another is in many ways meaningless, since my favorites can differ depending on my mood and whatever song is running through my head when I wake up in the morning. However, if I had to choose my general favorites, in no particular order, the list would look something like this:

  • Breakfast in Bedlam by Malcolm’s Interview: Also known as “God’s Little Monkeys,” Malcolm’s Interview was a short-lived punk band in England during the 1980s. Hard-driving lyrics, strong song-writing, and the occasional reinterpretation of folk standards make this first album worth hunting down if you weren’t around when it was released.
  • Celtic Hotel by Battlefield Band: Anything by Battlefield Band in its innumerable incarnations is worth hear. But in this album, the lineup included songwriter Brian McNeill, and the group soars above its usual lofty standards. Standouts include “The Roving Dies Hard,” a romantic overview of Scottish history,“Seacoalers,” a bitterly defiant soliloquy about an independent beachcomber, and a cover of Sting’s “We Work the Black Seam.”
  • Titanic Days by Kirsty MacColl: Dubbed MacColl’s divorce album, this album is full of breakup angst, defiance, female fantasy, and even a chilling look into the mind of a serial killer, all backed up by MacColl’s characteristic wall of sound. Listen to this album, and you’ll understand why she was once described as “the Dorothy Parker of pop.”
  • Waiting for Bonaparte by The Men They Couldn’t Hang: Using a name that The Pogues discarded, TMTCH sound in this album like a Mersey-side rock band with a historical perspective and a political conscience. Especially strong numbers include “The Crest,” a father’s last words to his son about the family tradition, and “The Colors,” an account of the great English naval mutiny at the turn of the 19th century.
  • Hat Trick by the Mollys: Tex-Mex punk folk sounds like it should be a disaster. Somehow, the Mollys made the combination work, combining original songs that sound like their lyrics were written by a female Sean McGowan with cheeky re-working of folk standards like “All Around My Hat” and “Myrshkin Derkin.”
  • Small Rebellions by James Keelaghan: James Keelaghan is one of Canada’s major song writers. This album is a mixture of unionism (“Hillcrest Mine” and “Small Rebellions,” Canadian history (“Red River Rising,” and “Rebecca’s Song” local patriotism (“Gladys Ridge”), humor (“Departure Bay”) and quiet lyricism (“Country Fair”) – something for anyone who prefers intelligent lyrics with their music.
  • Love, Loneliness and Laundry by Leon Rosselson and Roy Bailey: England’s answer to Tom Lehrer, Leon Rosselson also has a quieter, if no less satirical side. He is joined here by the rich voice of Roy Bailey, and occasionally feminist folk singer Frankie Armstrong. Warning: “Standup for Judas” should not be played if you have invited Christian friends over. The same goes for “Abezier Coppe.”
  • Mothers, Daughters, Wives by Judy Small. Australian’s premier feminist folk singer in the 1990s, Small has one of the most expressive voices I have ever heard. The title song is a description of the lives of her mother’s generation and the roles available to them, so moving that it could probably reduce the most confirmed misogynist in the world into tears at the waste.
  • Angel Tiger by June Tabor: June Tabor’s voice sounds like that of a survivor, sad and depressed, but still struggling, with one of the most expressive voices ever to come out of England. This album includes her gut-wrenching version of “Hard Love,” a story of hard-won maturity, and “All This Wasted Beauty,” the song that Elvis Costello wrote for her voice. Expect to be literally moved to tears.
  • Elemental by Loreena McKennitt: With her harp and an expressive voice that can glide effortlessly up and down the octaves, Loreena McKennit is not heard so much as experienced. This is her first album, a collection of folk standards plus an arrangement of W. B. Yeat’s “Stolen Child” that has to be heard to be believed.
  • The Shouting End of Life by OysterBand: This album catches OysterBand in its electric rock phase. Opening with the pro-environmental “We’ll Be There,” the album waxes lyrical in “By Northern Light” and “Long Dark Street,” switches into comedy with “Don’t Slit Your Wrists for Me,” and ends a rock version of Leon Rosselson’s anthem, “The World Turned Upside Down.”
  • Frivolous Love by Pete Morton: With a punk voice but a quiet sound, Morton specializes in enigmatic but moving lyrics, such as “The Sloth and the Greed” and “The Backward King.” The album also includes one of the best ever recordings of “Tamlyn.”
  • Memento: The Best of Maddy Prior by Maddy Prior: Frequently the lead singer for Steeleye Span and the occasional collaborator of June Tabor, Prior is one of folk rock’s best-known vocalists. This album covers a few folk standards, as well as Prior’s own considerable song-writing skills, which are on display in such numbers as “Commit the Crime” and “Face to Face,” as well as “Rose” and “Alex,” her odes to her children. But by far the most interesting song on the album is “The Sovereign Prince,” which contrasts Elizabeth I with the frivolous English girls who live in the world that she created.
  • The Texas Campfire Takes by Michelle Shocked: While I’m dismayed by Shock’s recent anti-gay sentiments, I have to admit she still writes effective music. This album is her version of the bootleg album that launched her career without her permision, The Texas Campfire Tapes, after she had regained the rights. It contains both the originally released songs and the unedited versions she rightly prefers.
  • Growl by Ray Wylie Hubbard: To his frequent regret, Hubbard is best-known for the outlaw country hit, “Up Against the Wall, You Redneck Mothers.” However, this album shows Hubbard is more complicated than that old hit would suggest, offering a unique combination of blues and rock, and songs that are vignettes of the American South that could have come from the pages of a William Faulkner novel.
  • Red Roses for Me by the Pogues: This early album shows The Pogues at their best. Their musicianship is displayed in instrumentals like “The Battle of Brisbane” and “Dingle Regatta,” and the strength of their lyrics in “Boys from County Hell” and “Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go.” The Pogues even take the time to cover Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilida” and fellow Irish rakehell Brendan Behan’s “The Old Triangle.”
  • From Fresh Water by Stan Rogers: Stan Rogers never released an album that was uninteresting, but this is by far his strongest. Part of his Canadian region recordings, it focuses on songs about Ontario. As might be expected from Rogers, many of the songs are about ships on the Great Lakes, including “White Squall” and “Lock Keeper.” Others are about Canadian history, such as “McDonnel on the Heights” and “The Nancy.” Still others are about the dreams of ordinary Canadians, including “Flying,” which is probably the only memorable song ever written by hockey.
  • Amnesia by Richard Thompson: The English guitar legend has dozens of albums to his credit, but Amnesia has a claim to being the best of them all, with all ten songs being winners. Its ballads include “Gypsy Love Song” and “Waltzing’s for Dreamers,” its had-edge material, “Yankee Go Home” and “Jerusalem on the Jukebox. It ends with“Pharoah,” a metaphorical social commentary unlike any you’re likely to have heard.
  • Singing of the Times by Tommy Sands:A peace activist in Irelands, Sands starts this album with, “There Were Roses” about The Troubles. Other songs like “Children of the Dole” and “Your Daughters and Your Sons” sound like activist anthems. However, some of his works, like “Humpty Dumpty” and “I’m Going Back on the Bicycle” display a sly sense of humor, and “Peter’s Song,” an elegy for a fiddler, is simply beautiful.
  • All Used Up by Utah Phillips: Nobody ever went to a Utah Phillips concert for his guitar playing. But if you like story telling or want to hear about the Wobblies and the great North American labor movements through their songs, this album is a great place to start.
  • Restless by Sam Weis: With her twelve string guitar and husky voice, Weis was a standard on the folk circuits of the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s before she retired to small town Washington to paint abstracts. Restless show her ability to write moving, original love songs, such as “Rubicon” and “Moment to Moment,” as well as her outstanding guitar work in songs like “Train to Big Sur” and her cover of Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot.”

You probably haven’t heard of most of these performers, especially if you live outside of Canada or the United Kingdom, and maybe not even then. But that’s why I list them – because if you do take the trouble to track them down, you’re unlikely to regret the effort.

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My re-discovery of Sam Weis

Posted in Bruce Byfield, folk music, music, Personal, Rogue Folk Club, Sam Weis, twelve string guitar, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

One benefit of digitalizing my music is the rediscovery of artists. Thanks to the digitalizing, I’ve tracked down at least a dozen artists and found what they’ve been doing since I first heard their music, including The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Michelle Shocked, Kirsty McColl, and Mark Graham. My latest re-discovery is Sam Weis, a twelve-string guitar player and writer of original songs from Washington State.

I don’t remember the first time I heard Weis, but it must have been at a Rogue Folk concert at the WISE Hall in East Vancouver. Possibly, I’d run across her previously at regional science fiction conventions; if not, it was someone remarkably similar. She had a vaguely punk sensibility that appealed to the front-row lesbians who seemed to attend every local folk concert in those days, and a twelve-string guitar that seemed almost too big for her and with which she could do almost anything. I especially remember the audience joining on the “Ride, ride, ride” chorus of “Til We’ve Seen It All,” and many of those around me crying at the longing expressed in the song.

At some point, we bought her Restless album, and over the years I played it often. But the CD lost its cover, and Weis seemed to be performing less, perhaps concentrating on her painting, which she also does professionally. Occasionally, I searched the Internet for her, but never found anything.

It was only last week, as I searched through my digital collection, that I realized that I had been looking for “Weiss,” adding an erroneous “s” to the end of her name. Having grabbed a clue, I located and downloaded her other three albums, and have been enjoying them for the past six days.

Finding an analogy for Sam Weis’ work isn’t easy, because it appeals in a number of different ways. Listening to her cover of “Dancing Barefoot,” I might compare her to Patti Smith with a stronger voice and better guitar work. Listening to “’55 Ford,” you might mistake her for a rocker. Her instrumental “Helix” is reminiscent of the Scottish harp duo Sileas. Another instrumental, “Train to Blue Sky” sounds like something the Allman Brothers might have recorded in their heyday, while “Breakfast with Bob” has an acoustic quietness. Philosophical pieces like “Why Not Utopia?” are reminiscent of Tori Amos in expression, while “Seven Sisters Road” suggests Michelle Shocked feeling nostalgic. Some critics have compared her to Joan Armatrading because of her probing relationship songs.

All these comparisons have a grain of insight, and none is accurate by itself, if only because Weis’ versatility is always supported by her strong guitar skills and a voice that, while ordinary in range, has a husky vibrato that suggests ambiguity and repressed emotion, making it second to very few in expression.

At times, her lyrics teeter at the edge of triteness, often as she finds herself boxed in by a scarcity of non-cliched rhymes. Such low points are especially likely to happen when she waxes philosophical in songs like “Why Not Utopia?” or “Shape of Time.” Not that such songs aren’t redeemed by the arrangements, but tackling such topics in a three or four minute song is only slightly easier than doing so on Twitter.

By contrast, Weis’ lyrics are at their height when she deals with personal emotions, whose complexities and ambiguities she expresses better than almost anyone. For instance, in “Seven Sisters Road,” she talks about youthful sessions with friends “where we invented destiny / And traded rage for poetry.”

Her lyrics are at their best when describing the intricacies of love in plain language. In “Restless Heart,” for example, she pleads, “Open up and let me come in / My lessons have been learned and I want to try again” and invites her lover to “slow dance on the back porch.” Similarly, in “Moment to Moment,” she expresses the obsessiveness of love with:

I don’t want to spend one more night
With you on my mind,
I’m going to be so tough when I pretend
I can leave this love behind.

However, my personal favorite remains “Til We’ve Seen It All.” I suppose you might argue that, in modern times, a song about cruising the highways with a lover isn’t environmentally correct. All the same, the poignancy remains despite such quibbles:

This is how I see
The golden American Dream,
Three thousand miles of asphalt,
Four wheels and a holy machine;
I’ve been chasing the illusion
Like an astronaut running down a star,
The dream to go fast, go hard,
Go now and go far.

I’m sure that the only way that any listener can fail to be moved by the longing is if they’ve completely given up their own ambitions and dreams.

None of this is to dismiss Weis’ instrumentals – just to say that I’m more qualified to discuss her words. Instrumentals like “Cosmo and Peanut” and “Helix” from her just-released album Paradox have already kept me sane while riding public transit, and I plan on them doing the same many times in the future. The fact is, all Weis’ albums have a permanent place on my music player, and I”ll happily listen to whatever other music she releases.

The only question I have is: Why isn’t this artist better known?

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The 15 musical groups that I listen to the most

Posted in Battlefield Band, Bruce Byfield, Garnet Rogers, June Tabor, Leon Rosselson, Maddy Prior, Michelle Shocked, music, oysterband, Personal, Richard Thompson, Stan Rogers, Steeleye Span, The Corries, The Mollys, The Pogues, Uncategorized, Utah Phillips, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

For the past two years, I’ve been digitalizing my music collection. Considering I still have music I bought in high school, it’s a staggering assortment of LPs, EPs, cassettes, and CDs, and I have at least another year before I finish. Probably the only reason I haven’t abandoned the project is the certain knowledge that, if I do, in the near future I’ll be unable to play some irreplaceable music. But the project has led me to rediscover music that I haven’t listened to in years, and taught me something about my musical tastes.

In particular, among the 7200 tracks I’ve digitalized so far, there are some artists to whom I listen far more than others. Putting aside classical favorites for another blog, most of the ones I keep returning to fall into the category of folk rock. Most, too, either have intelligent lyrics, a strong beat, a sense of showmanship (in the sense of how to build excitement in a show or on an album), or all three. Many are English or Scottish.

My fifteen favorite are:

Battlefield Band

One of the two classic Scottish folk groups (the other is Silly Wizard), Battlefield Band has released dozens of albums, and a constantly changing lineup over several decades. Its music always includes a large number of instrumentals, and original lyrics about contemporary or historical Scotland. My favorite album from the group is Celtic Hotel, whose memorable cuts include “The Roving Dies Hard,”a look at the restlessness of Scots over the centuries and “Seacoalers,” a hard, unsentimental look at the bottom of the mining industry.

The Mollys

A Tex-Mex band whose heyday was the Nineties, The Mollys were the front for song-writer Nancy McCallion, whose persona might be described as a milder, female version of Shane McGowan. They did comical updates of standards like “Mershkin Dirkin” and “All Around My Hat,” but also strikingly original songs like “Don’t Wanna Go to Bed,” “Cash for Gold,” and “Yer Drunk Again / Polka Diablo.” And who else would dare to entitle a live album “Wankin’ Out West”?

Richard Thompson

Whether with his ex-wife Linda Thompson, Fairport Convention, or solo, Richard Thompson seems unstoppable, putting out album after album of memorable lyrics backed by equally memorable guitar work. I can’t begin to list the number of classic songs he wrote, but they include, “Down Where the Drunkards Roll,” “I Wanna See the Bright Lights Tonight,” “Pharaoh,” “When I Get to the Border,” and others far too numerous to list. Amnesia is his most memorable album.

The Corries

The Corries were Roy Williamson and Ronnie Browne. Starting in the mid-1960s, The Corries showed a new generation that folk music didn’t have to be stiff and boring. For many people, especially in The Society for Creative Anachronism, they were the first introduction to Scottish standards like “Johnny Cope” and “PrestonPans.” In-between such set pieces, they were also known to write parodies of Top 40 favorites. Ronnie Browne also wrote “Flower of Scotland,” which many people believe should be Scotland’s national anthem.

Maddy Prior

Best-known for her work with Steeleye Span, Prior is one of England’s leading folk singers, writing and performing modern songs and even reviving ballads and hymns from the eighteen century, as well as medieval religious ballads. Her original compositions include “The Sovereign Prince,” which compares Elizabeth I to jet-setting modern young women, “Commit the Crime,” “After the Death” and countless others. The Momento retrospective is probably the best sampling of her range, although her Silly Sisters albums with June Tabor are also worth tracking down.

Michelle Shocked

Michelle Shocked was introduced as a naif singer with The Texas Campfire Tapes. Then, shortly after her third album, she disappeared in a decade-long struggle to gain control of her own recordings. Recently, however, she has re-emerged, in control of her own music, releasing it the way she always wanted it to be heard, and proving herself as versatile, sly, and politically engaged as ever. Her best-known song is “Anchorage,” which was a minor hit, but almost anything she does is worth listening to. In one of her more recent songs, “I Think We Should See Other People,” she likens her relationship to the United States to that of a woman with an abusive husband. Short Sharp Shocked, Captain Swing, and her most recent album, Soul of My Soul, are among her most memorable albums.

Garnet Rogers

The younger brother of the better-known Stan Rogers (see below), in the years since his brother’s death, Garnet Rogers has carved out his own niche as a singer-songwriter. Although self-described as a Hulk Hogan lookalike, Rogers is known for intelligent, often heart-wrenching songs like “The Beauty Game,” “Small Victory,” “Frankie and Johnny,”and “Sleeping Buffalo,” many of which are chunks of life reminiscent of his brother’s best work without being in any way derivative. Unfortunately, none of his albums capture his on-stage banter, but Summer Lightning and Night Drive are good places to start.

Steeleye Span

Someone once compared Steeleye Span to a bus that people are constantly getting on and off. But whichever of its half dozen incarnations you happen across, it’s worth hearing – especially if Maddy Prior happens to be with them. Years ago, Steeleye Span showed that traditional songs were compatible with modern pop with songs like “Thomas the Rhymer,” and, if recent versions of the band are less well-known, they are equally worth listening to. You can start anywhere, but Live at Last and Storm Force Ten are typical of the group’s early days, while The Journey is a capsule history.

June Tabor

Nobody can compress a sense of suppressed melancholy and anger into a song like June Tabor. Now she is in her sixties, she has lost some of the range you can hear on the early Airs and Graces, but her ability to put across a song is stronger than ever on Ragged Kingdom, her newly-released collaboration with Oysterband. Listening to her, you get a sense of someone who has suffered emotionally and emerged stronger from the ordeal, leaving an undefinable sense of sadness and anger. Tabor doesn’t write her own material, but shows her exquisite taste in such pieces as “The King of Rome,” a song about a racing pigeon; “Aqaba,” which concerns the last moments of Lawrence of Arabia, and “Hard Love,” a love song about not expressing what you are feeling. Tabor isn’t always easy to listen to, but she’s always unforgettable. “Aqaba” and “Angel Tiger” are two of her strongest albums.

Ray Wylie Hubbard

Ray Wylie Hubbard is best-known as a Country and Western outlaw, due mainly to his early song, “Up Against the Wall, You Redneck Mothers.” The fact is, he is considerably more complex, mixing rock, the blues, and country into something strikingly unique. Who else would do a song like “Stolen Horses” about reincarnation and horse-stealing? Or a Southern Gothic like “This River Runs Red”? His other songs include slices of life like “Dallas After Midnight” and “Mississippi Flush.” Some of his most complex work was produced by Gurf Morlix, including the albums Growl and Eternal and Lowdown.

The Pogues

This is as close I get to popular music. The Pogues are Irish folk gone punk, with dozens of original songs, ranging from the upbeat “The Sick Bed of Cuchulain” to the surprisingly sentimental “A Rainy Night in Soho.” Much of their magic was due to the song-writing genius of Shane McGowan, but, sadly, his lapse into incoherence on stage also spelled the end of the group as a creative force; these days, they tour, but reocrd nothing new. Red Roses for Me, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, and If I Should Fall from Grace with God are among their standout albums.

Stan Rogers

Frequently considered the greatest of Canadian folk singers, Stan Rogers became an instant legend when he died prematurely in a plane crash, apparently while trying to help other passengers. His songs are slices of Canadian life, explored region by region, boomed out in his strong baritone and – thanks largely to his brother Garnet – wonderfully arranged. His “Northwest Passage” is almost an unofficial Canadian anthem, while his “Barrett’s Privateers” is believed by many to be traditional. “Live in Halifax” gives a sense of what his concerts were like, while some of his best work can be found on From Fresh Water, Northwest Passage, and Fogarty’s Cove.

Utah Phillips

If you are interested in labor history as expressed through songs, you don’t need to look any further than Utah Phillips. Without him, songs like “We Have Fed You All For A Thousand Years” and “Where the Fraser River Flows” would be all but lost. His own songs, like “All Used Up,” “Eddy’s Song,” and “Enola Gay” are equally powerful. A strong voice in telling the forgotten labor history of North America, Phillips was also an unparalleled story-teller, as collections like The Moscow Hold and The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, his collaboration with Ani DiFranco, clearly show. The four CD collection, Starlight on the Rails is the perfect place to become acquainted with his work.

Leon Rosselson

Imagine Flanders and Swan with leftist political beliefs, and you have a dim idea of what Leon Rosselson is like. With anti-monarchist songs like “On Her Silver Jublilee” and the anti-Christian “Standup for Judas,” Rosselson constantly expressed views that were far from mainstream, attacking hypocrisy with comic exaggeration and a strong sense of the ridiculous. Songs of his like “That’s Not the Way It’s Got to Be” and “The World Turned Upside Down” have become activist anthems (in fact, you can hear them being sung by the Occupy supporters). Much of his best work was done with Roy Bailey, and can be found on his just-released retrospective, The World Turned Upside Down.

OysterBand

Originally a dance band, Oysterband are known today for their consummate live performances and strong song-writing abilities. Their sensibility is definitely left wing, but their music comes first. Having recently celebrated their thirtieth anniversary together, Oysterband has over thirty albums to their credit, ranging from the hard rock sound of The Shouting Edge of Life to the acoustic sound of Deep Dark Ocean. Their collaborations with June Tabor, Freedom and Rain and Ragged Kingdom, are memorable as collaborations that are more than the sum of their extraordinary parts.

If I expanded this group to thirty, I could include many other artists to whom I frequently listen – to name a few, Attila the Stockbroker, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Pete Morton, Kirsty MacColl, Lorenna McKennitt, Sileas, and Tommy Sands.

But the fifteen I mention here are the ones I return to most often. Over the years, they have relaxed and sustained me, relaxed and entertained and moved me. Without them I wouldn’t be who I was, and, looking at them, you can get a sense of exactly who I am, should you happen to care.

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Review: June Tabor and Oysterband’s “Ragged Kingdom”

Posted in Bruce Byfield, music, oysterband, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Forget Mick Jagger and Super Heavy. If you’re interested in British folk rock — or even aging musicians who still have their creativity intact — then the team-up of the year isn’t Jagger and associates. It’s Ragged Kingdom, the first collaborative album between diva June Tabor and Oysterband since Freedom and Rain in 1990.

That 1990 album remains a cult item, one of those rare collaborations in which the result is something that none of the participants could have managed on their own. You could hear Tabor and Oysterband lead singer John Jones inspiring one another, while the rest of Oysterband transcended their usual versatile excellence to allow Tabor to do arrangements she could never have done by herself, or even with her usual arrangement of a single supporting musician.

Freedom and Rain was also responsible for one of my most memorable concert experiences ever. It was 1991 at the night club at what was then Vancouver’s Plaza of Nations. There, Trish and I listened to two memorable sets that kept cranking the excitement higher and higher. By the encore – a deliberately campy “White Rabbit” complete with dry ice and Tabor in a leather mini-skirt – the only people that weren’t blissfully sated were the waiters, who were sulky about a crowd that had come to listen instead of drink.

Since then, Tabor and Oysterband had played together informally, most notably at Oysterband’s Big Session festivals, and done several covers of rock classics on Tabor’s On Air album. But a studio album was something else altogether, and I have to admit that I first played Ragged Kingdom expecting to be disappointed. After twenty years, how could the magic possibly be repeated?

Well, it can’t be, not in exactly the same way, even though both albums are a similar mix of contemporary and traditional pieces. However, a dozen bars into the first cut, a hard driving version of “Bonny Bunch of Roses,” I knew that I was experiencing something just as extraordinary in its own way. Ragged Kingdom has a harder sound than “Freedom and Rain” – possibly, I would say after listening to his solo album, due to Ray “Chopper” Cooper’s growing involvement in Oysterband’s arrangements – but I haven’t heard a sound with such authority since I first heard Stan Rogers at sunset at the Vancouver Folk Festival or heard Steeleye Span’s “Thomas the Rhymer” coming out of my portable radio when I was in high school.

Or in case you have different touchstones, let me put it this way: right away, I knew I was listening to something original and compelling – something that I had to sit down and listen to, not just have playing in the background as I went about my day.

All the musicians sound like they are enjoying themselves on Ragged Kingdom too much to care much about billing. However, so far as selection is concerned, the album is more June Tabor’s than Oysterband’s. None of their original songs are included. Instead, as on most of Tabor’s releases, the album has an eclectic mix of traditional and new.

Among the traditional pieces, standouts include “Bonny Bunch of Roses,” and “Judas (Was A Red-Headed Man),” two songs I believe that I have heard mentioned in passing, but whose lyrics I’ve never read, and that I have never before heard performed. Both suggest how much potential remains untapped in traditional song, “Bonny Bunch of Roses” being a dialog between Napoleon’s son and his mother about the British Empire, and “Judas” slipping in pious Christianity with decidedly pagan elements and popular tradition. Another piece, “Son David,” belongs to a well-known tradition of a dialog between a fleeing murderer and his mother, but with enough of a new slant in the arrangement to make it interesting.

The contemporary selections are equally varied, ranging from Bob Dylan’s “Seven Curses” to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is especially transformed, being transmuted from Joy Divison’s quick and monotonic delivery to a slow, heart-wrenching duet between Tabor and Jones.

Ragged Kingdom has only two minor faults. First, the hard rhythm of most of the cuts could do with a little more variation. Second, “The Dark Side of the Street” seems a slightly weak ending to the album. However, I expect that these faults would disappear in live performance, and I only hope that Tabor and the Oysterband do a tour for the album in North America in the coming months. I suspect that the experience would be as memorable as the Freedom and Rain concert whose memory I still value.

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